Quantifying vacuum-like jets in heavy-ion collisions: a machine learning study

Abstract The modification of jets by interaction with the quark gluon plasma has been extensively established through the comparison of observables computed for samples of jets produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions and proton-proton collisions. The presence of vacuum-like jets, jets that experienced little interaction with the quark gluon plasma, in the nucleus-nucleus samples dilutes the overall observed modification hindering the detailed study of the underlying physical mechanisms. The ability to ascertain on a jet-by-jet basis the degree of modification of a jet would be an invaluable step in overcoming this limitation. We consider a Transformer classifier, trained on a low-level representation of jets given by the 4-momenta of all its constituents. We show that the Transformer is able to capture discriminating information not accessible to other architectures which use high-level physical observables as input. The Transformer allows us to identify, in the experimentally relevant case where both medium response and underlying event contamination are accounted for, a class of jets that have been unequivocally modified. Further, we perform a robust estimate of the upper bound for the fraction of jets in nucleus-nucleus collisions that are, for all purposes, indistinguishable from those produced in proton-proton collisions.